Plague and Cultural Panic: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’

Abstract

Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ turns on the paradox of a privileged elite succumbing to a plague that is ravaging society at large, and from which they believe themselves completely protected. The horror of the story consists not in the devastation of external society – that is taken for granted – but in the abject failure of the elite’s supposedly impregnable defences, their faith in which is exposed by the ‘Red Death’ as utterly delusory. ‘Put not your trust in Princes’ (Ps. 146.3) takes on an entirely new meaning.

Full text

Plague and Cultural Panic: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’
Laurence Wright
Abstract
Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ turns on the paradox of a privileged elite succumbing
to a plague that is ravaging society at large, and from which they believe themselves
completely protected. The horror of the story consists not in the devastation of external
society – that is taken for granted – but in the abject failure of the elite’s supposedly
impregnable defences, their faith in which is exposed by the ‘Red Death’ as utterly delusory.
‘Put not your trust in Princes’ (Ps. 146.3) takes on an entirely new meaning.
Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, symbol and allegory, The
Castle of Otranto, Á Rebours, Axёl, The Tempest, The Aeneid, translatio imperii, Tennyson
I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house,
Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.
I said, ‘O Soul, make merry and carouse,
Dear soul, for all is well.’ (Tennyson, 1832: ‘The Palace of Art’ 1‒4)
Poe’s short story of 1842 has been the ‘go-to’ candidate for many journalists and
commentators seeking to hallow the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic with a literary referent.
As recently as 1989, Hubert Zapf called the tale ‘a strangely contemporary text’ (217). How
much more is this so in the aftermath of 2020.1
A Prince, ‘happy and dauntless and sagacious,’ whose dominions have been so
ravaged by a pestilence called the ‘Red Death’ that the population has halved, chooses a
thousand ‘hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court’ and
retreats to one of his ‘castellated abbeys’ surrounded by ‘a strong and lofty wall’ (670). Once
inside, the iron gates are welded shut, leaving the chosen few means ‘neither of ingress nor
egress’ (671). After five or six weeks of enjoying ‘the appliances of pleasure,’ they give
themselves up to decadent revelry in a masquerade ball, hosted by the Prince. We are made to
understand that beyond this privileged enclave, devastation and death ensue unabated. All
detail of the circumambient horror is occluded from the story, unremarked and unreferenced,
left wholly to the imagination. ‘The external world could take care of itself’ (671). Protected

by secluding walls, the Prince’s elite company is meant to be safe. Except they are not: they
all die.
The relevance of the tale today seems patent if puzzling. COVID-19 has been no
respecter of elites despite the advantages wealth and privilege can buy. The literary topos is
well worn. Consider this stanza from Thomas Nash’s haunting ‘A Litany in Time of Plague’
(1600) (as it is titled by modern anthologizers), another obvious literary bellwether in these
trying times:
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us! (8‒14)
Similar instances could be multiplied. The puzzle is that the text of ‘Masque of the Red
Death’ offers no explicit indictment of wealth. Poe’s tale certainly impugns elitism, but on
what grounds? Poe’s editor, Thomas Mabbott, confidently sees in the tale ‘a clear moral that
one cannot run away from responsibility’ (667). Obviously, elites can and do abdicate
responsibility – as Poe’s tale suggests. In any case, as with much of Poe’s writing, ethical
judgment is left to his readers. The charge might be one of arrogant confidence in privileged
hierarchy, or culpable neglect of others’ welfare, or careless epidemiological bravado or just
breathtaking social insouciance. Or perhaps something else – a different kind of panic?
A striking feature of the tale is its total avoidance of any close-up treatment of the Red
Death’s ravages being inflicted on the general populace. Instead, in the opening paragraph,
the reader is given a succinct account of the plague’s physical manifestations:
There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores,
with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the
victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and sympathy of his
fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the
incidents of half an hour. (670)
This is magnificently grim and portentous, and readers might consequently anticipate a tale
embellished with agonizing accounts of suffering, individual and collective. This never
materializes. The story pretext insists that the tell-tale scarlet stains on the body and face of
victims isolate them from human sympathy; society shuns plague victims because of public
fear of contagion. On the contrary, what really excludes them from the reader’s sympathy or

empathy is the author’s brutal determination to excise them from the story’s imaginative
universe. Their suffering is determinedly ‘offstage’. This is both odd and puzzling. Equally
intriguing is the prognosis that from start to finish, inception to death, the progress of the Red
Death takes ‘half an hour,’ almost exactly the time it takes to read Poe’s story carefully. It
would seem that ‘Masque of the Red Death’ may be a plague of a different kind, a literary
thanatos, a metonym for the reader’s own imagined death as a reader. Poe leaves his
audience in a world wherein ‘Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable
dominion over all’ (677).
Poe has his readers accompany the ‘happy and sagacious and dauntless’ Prince to a
castellated abbey, remote from suffering society, where they imaginatively indulge in a
decadent and extravagant ‘lockdown’ party, believing themselves wholly immune to the
plague thanks to elaborate physical quarantine measures (670). Of course, they are not safe,
as the story’s denouement makes plain. ‘Put not your trust in Princes’ (Ps. 146.3). But why
not? The physical barriers are robust. There is no hint of a possible route by which plague
might enter the abbey. In that era there could be no recognition of viral transmission, a
mechanism only discovered at the end of the century, and even if there were, the abbey is
locked down, secluded, amply provisioned and determinedly self-sufficient. In terms of the
realized constitution of Poe’s fictional world, the reader would be ‘cheating’ were he or she
to imagine some means of secret ingress for the plague, physical or metaphysical, that the
authorial voice somehow forgot to mention. The supposition would be completely
impermissible according to the tale’s narrative logic.
Yet the uninvited masquer does arrive, wholly unexpectedly, to disrupt the Prince’s
revelry. He is clad in lineaments which gruesomely portray the plague those present have
striven to escape and from which they believe themselves completely shielded. When directly
confronted and attacked by the Prince, the intruder is literally disrobed and, as his garments
drop to the floor, inside is found… absolutely nothing. Not only do the Prince and his
company die, one after the other, presumably according to the aetiology of the plague (this is
left tantalizingly unclear), but the fictional universe itself succumbs, leaving only the plague
and decay. The half-hour read is up. ‘Masque of the Red Death’ seduces its readers into
experiencing, or at least contemplating, what death might mean. The narrative arc of the story
subsides into imaginative nullity, its conclusion offering us no escape route. The whole
suffering world is notionally there, beyond the isolated abbey and outside the story, but we as
readers are deemed to know nothing of it. We have ‘died’.

The question arises as to why Poe created this elaborate phantasy of escape only to
insist, paradoxically, that there is in fact no possibility of escape. The Prince and his guests
suffer the fate of the populace. To put it another way, would not a realist account of the
progress of the plague among the suffering populace serve his purpose just as well? Why
satirize the self-indulgent escapism of an elite locked away in a castellated abbey, especially
if their escape attempt proves unsuccessful?
Poe is an enormously conscious and deliberate artist. In the second of his two 1842
reviews of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, he was theoretically insistent that ‘there should be
no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established
design’ (299). The issue of Graham’s Magazine where this review appeared is the very one
that ran ‘The Mask of the Red Death. A Fantasy’. Poe later changed ‘Mask’ to ‘Masque’ and
dropped the subtitle. This ambivalence over his title goes to the heart of the story. The
masque sets out to mask the plague but fails abjectly. Poe’s irony is directed not at the plague
itself, but at the presumptuous human culture that seeks to ignore and evade it.
(To bring the story for a moment into our own twenty-first century pandemic crisis,
consider the ‘illegal’ house parties that violate COVID-19 lockdown rules, those gormless
crowds milling about unprotected on the beaches of Florida during Spring Break, mindless
sun-bathers in the parks of Europe, all social distancing forgotten in the bliss of ‘normal’
freedoms, and we begin to understand how a Poe-like virus, uninvited, may already be
attending the human ‘party’. The virus is invisible.)
But ‘Masque of the Red Death’ offers a more profound challenge than these
contemporary instances might suggest. Poe’s strictures are directed, not at trivial human
behaviours such as those that drive today’s evasion of simple protocols introduced to curb
COVID-19 – partying from habit or to forget – but at the more fundamental way the whole
fabric of human culture loses its significance, buckles and collapses, in response to plague
because it has no cogent means of understanding or acknowledging the insurgence. Poe tells
his readers that the external world can take care of itself. The implication must be that the
threat that interests him is to the internal world.
This is a horror story, but the horror does not consist in the ravages of the plague
visited offstage on the helpless populace. The elite revellers die from this inscrutable
pestilence, an imperceptible nothingness, as readily as ordinary people. Poe’s tale is an
elaborate parable indicting the nescience of human art and culture measured against the
malignant will of the plague – something COVID-19 has emphasized emphatically for our
own generation. The real horror is the inexplicable ease with which the plague infiltrates and

undermines what has been (for better or worse) formally established as an irrefragable elite
enclave, namely the rich defensive legacy of human culture – a castellated abbey of the mind.
This high culture is humanity’s ‘home,’ our collective refuge, a richly endowed resource and
legacy inherited from countless earlier generations, something the privileged treasure and
wallow in, while the disadvantaged populace sleep-walks unregarding through this (to them)
invisible heritage. Unmasking the intruding masquer – disguised as the ‘Red Death’ – reveals
his nothingness, and this ‘nothingness’ in turn unmasks the masque, exposing its nullity.
What then does the decadent masque symbolize and how is its significance realized in Poe’s
story?
Various ‘Poes’ are discernible in today’s literary criticism. Take your pick: the sickly
Southern outcast, the self-conscious craftsman, the Freudian exemplum, the proto-
deconstructionist, the hack writing for money, the aesthetic theoretician, the not-so-covert
racist, the literary rebel. Of special importance is Poe’s catalytic role in the evolution of
French Symbolism. Fin de siècle England scarcely knew what to make of his influence on
French art and letters, leading T.S. Eliot to observe of writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé
and Valéry that ‘we should be prepared to entertain the possibility that these Frenchmen have
seen something in Poe that English-speaking readers have missed’ (Eliot 328). That seminal
‘something’ was canvassed, deliberated over and disseminated during leisurely Tuesday
receptions hosted by Mallarmé in his small fourth-floor apartment in Paris’s Rue de Rome,
attended variously by the cream of contemporary experimental writers, French and English,
including Huysmans, Laforgue, Valéry, Remy de Gourmont, André Gide, Arthur Symons,
W.B. Yeats, George Moore, Oscar Wilde and others, not excluding ‘modernising’ painters
such as Manet, Gauguin and Whistler, each of whom made off in a different direction with
the fruits of this discourse. The core message was Poe’s disconcerting swerve away from
naturalism towards la poésie pure: the work of art as an end in itself (Eliot 338) – as
symbolic. Significant distinctions between the meanings of ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’ emerged
only at the end of the eighteenth century. Gadamer points out that earlier, across Europe, the
two terms were virtually synonymous (72). Symbolism traded the earlier notion of symbol as
conventionally understood – as a one-for-one sign standing in for publicly available
knowledge – for the deliberate deployment of idiosyncratic figures evoking obscure
ambiences, feelings and notions unique to the artist. In his Maxims and Reflections (1809‒
1836), Goethe explained that with symbolism ‘the more particular represents the more
general, not as a dream or shade, but as a vivid, instantaneous revelation of the Inscrutable’
(‘Maxim 202’ 1906). Texts and images must operate by suggestion and indirect evocation,

avoiding direct statement. It was a risky strategy. Communication might fail (Balakian; Pach;
Wilson).
Critics have vigorously indulged various forms of allegory and allegoresis in their
efforts to interpret ‘Masque of the Red Death’. The starting point must be to ask whether
anything in the text absolutely demands such treatment. What happens if the allegorising
impulse is resisted? For instance, were we to posit a naïvely vacuous ideal reader, one with
no literary or artistic experience at all, merely a literal command of the English language,
there is no compelling reason why ‘Masque of the Red Death’ should not be received as a
simple univocal horror story devoid of allegorical potential. Several critics have insisted that
this is indeed how it should be taken, notably Julian Symons (1978) and Nicholas Ruddick
(1985). Typical of the approach is Stuart Levine’s remark that ‘One can best convey the
nature of “Red Death” by saying that it is really not about a moral issue at all, but is really
“about” the thrill of horror it hopes to produce in the reader’ (200). On this view, the tale is
best construed as if it were a monological horror film, lacking anything demanding further
reflection or interrogation. The story’s superficial impact adequately exhausts the text.
For readers of this persuasion resisting allegoresis is barely a decision. More complex
choices are cognitively unavailable or resisted on principle as, inherently, these readers hew
to a version of Occam’s razor, prioritising simplicity of response. Such an attitude gains
analytical support by regarding the Prince’s retreat to the sealed confines of a ‘castellated
abbey’ as a technical device to invoke the claustrophobic atmosphere of horror, a mere
writerly mechanism. Poe himself admitted, ‘It has always appeared to me that a close
circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident: it has the
force of a frame to a picture’ (‘Composition’ 166). This point of view is valid if, and only if,
we accept the assumption of a sentient but vacuous reader, a decoder of text whose reflective
capabilities and literary experience have been so limited that the tale is experienced solely at
the level of ‘This is what happened’. Achieve this imaginative nullity and our putative reader
is appropriately equipped to conclude, as Donald Trump did of COVID-19, that ‘“it is what it
is”’ (Cole and Subramanium 2020).
Better informed readers would probably note that retreat from the exigencies of the
world to a secluded castle is a staple of the symbolist imagination, celebrated in many
extravagant romantic and aesthetic detours from the mundane world. They might think of
Horace Walpole (1717‒1797) reconceptualising his mansion, Strawberry Hill, on the banks
of the Thames at Twickenham, in line with neo-Gothic prescripts. Dozing off, Sir Horace
dreams of a ‘gigantic hand in armour’ floating down the banister of a great staircase. This

odd fusion of mediaeval fantasy and his amateur architectural obsessions produced The
Castle of Otranto (1764), the strange work that inaugurated the Gothic novel, an undoubted
precursor to ‘Masque of the Red Death’. The example of an eccentric aristocrat retreating
from hum-drum modernity to a world of private fantasy embodied in antique architecture is
certainly congruent with aspects of Poe’s fabulation.
An equally cogent instance of aesthetic retreat from the contemporary world,
stemming directly from the symbolist reaction to naturalism that Poe (via Baudelaire and
Mallarmé) had in large measure inspired, would be J.-K. Huysmans’ Á Rebours (1884), often
translated as Against Nature, the French decadent novel that became an important influence
on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Baron Jean des Esseintes, sole survivor
of a once powerful aristocratic dynasty, having wrecked his physique with riotous living in
the fleshpots of Paris, conceives of a restorative aesthetic retreat. He buys a villa high above
the village of Fontenay on the outskirts of the City, alters it to his own demanding
architectural specifications and fills it with objects designed to satisfy his obsessive sensory
connoisseurship – paintings, literature, furnishings, lighting, liqueurs, aromas, music and so
forth. Urban modernity, the industrial demos, is to be kept at bay. He rejoices that ‘the height
on which [his home] was perched and its isolation insulated him from the hubbub of the vile
hordes which the vicinity of a railway station invariably attracts on a Sunday afternoon’
(Huysmans 35). In the end this insupportable decadent/aesthetic project collapses, implying
that Des Esseintes’s approach to life is indeed Á Rebours, ‘Against Nature’ or ‘the wrong
way’.
Then there is Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s play Axёl, published serially in La Jeune
France between November 1885 and June 1886, a work that had little success on stage but is
regarded as perhaps the archetypal symbolist drama. Villiers was a friend of Baudelaire’s and
adored both Poe and Wagner. His story evokes the retreat of a handsome young Count, Axёl
d’Auersperg, to a remote castle in Germany’s Black Forest where he immerses himself in
hermetic philosophy under the direction of a Rosicrucian adept, preparing himself for some
final revelation of alchemical mysteries. He is joined by a beautiful young French
noblewoman, Sara de Maupers, also a Rosicrucian, who has escaped from her convent prior
to taking the veil and brings with her knowledge of the whereabouts of unimaginable riches
hidden in Axёl’s castle. Sara finds the treasure, and the two, Axёl and Sara, abandoning their
cherished hermetic austerity, fall in love. In principle, everything the world has to offer now
lies open to them. Long pages are devoted to description of imaginary romantic ecstasies
available in places round the world that they could freely sample. But no, having wallowed in

these enticing possibilities, Axёl rejects them, and proposes suicide as the only apt
culmination. When Sara suggests a night of passion beforehand, he demurs, arguing that
being in thrall to her body would fatally jeopardise his spiritual harmony. Preferring his
private carapace of abstract contemplation, Axёl eventually persuades Sara of death’s
supposed superior freedom, they drink a goblet of poison, and perish in ecstasy.
The instances of escapist aesthetic fantasy described above suggest the idiosyncratic
temperament of the symbolist ‘hero,’ typified in much European literature of the era, and
summed up marvellously by Walter Pater in his Marius the Epicurean (1885), where he
writes of Marius: ‘He was become aware of the possibility of a large dissidence between an
inward and somewhat exclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved,
unheightened reality of the life of those about him’ (133) – exactly the predicament Poe sets
up in ‘Masque of the Red Death’. These stories uncover connections between aesthetic and
sensual aspiration as the mainspring of personal desire, and embody an inherent elitism
symbolised by architectural retreat and spatial remove from the quotidian populace. Almost
as if he were generalising from the predicament explored in ‘Masque of the Red Death,’ the
philosopher Schopenhauer has this to say about art and elitism in his magnum opus, The
World as Will and Representation:
the most excellent works of any art, the noblest productions of genius, must eternally
remain sealed books to the dull majority of men, and are inaccessible to them. They
are separated from them by a wide gulf, just as the society of princes is inaccessible
to the common people. (234)
Readers who can readily place Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’ in the rarefied aesthetic
company briefly explored above are clearly marked off from ‘the dull majority of men’. They
belong in ‘the society of princes’. From this realization, a disturbing reflexive critique flames
back at Poe’s readers: ‘If it is my own reservoirs of literary meaning which inform and
sustain my response to the tale, may I not, by analogy, be complicit with Poe’s noxious elite
roistering away in a castellated “literary” abbey, exuding callous neglect of quotidian
humanity?’ Robert Regan puts it this way: ‘Finding the right clue occasions a smile, a
murmur, a glow of self-esteem; it delights us because it raises us above less perceptive
readers – in other words because it debases the easily deluded mass of mankind’ (298).
Readers have been seduced into entering an aesthetic retreat, a fictive Strawberry Hill or
Axёl’s castle, of their own making. Superior literary percipience – if this is what it is –
separates them from naïve readers in much the way that the Prince’s chosen few are hived off

from the mass for incarceration (or ‘protection’) in his luxurious abbey. But their separation
cannot save them from horror. Indeed, this is the horror.
In search of Regan’s ‘right clue,’ consider the Prince’s name, Prospero. The symbolic
cue is highly attenuated in its vehicle, a mere fragment, yet open to huge indeterminate vistas
in its tenor. The literary minded will immediately think of Shakespeare’s Duke in his elegiac
play, The Tempest (1610‒1611). A salutary check to such presumption results from
consulting Professor Google: no such correlation emerges in the first page of search results.
Not one mention of Shakespeare. Indeed, nothing in Poe’s text insists on Shakespeare. We
must make the connection and nail our literariness to the masthead as we do so. Both
Prosperos, Poe’s and Shakespeare’s, put on masques, each of which is radically disrupted.
Poe’s Prospero has his masque invaded by a figure in the guise of the Red Death, whose
unmasking actualises instant mortality for everyone; Shakespeare’s Prospero has his masque
disrupted by a belated memory of the slave Caliban’s hapless insurrection:
I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life. (4.1.139‒40)
… a mental irruption that precipitates Prospero’s apocalyptic vision of annihilation in which
the ‘cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples’ and, finally, ‘the great
globe itself’ dissolve, leaving ‘not a rack behind’ (4.1.152‒53). This is horror on a grand
scale. The world is as illusory as art, as the theatre itself. Moreover, if we recognize in
Shakespeare’s ‘cloud-capped towers’ speech a deft moralizing re-write of Virgil, we will
recall that Aeneas’s elegiac meditation on the destruction of his home city of Troy takes place
in Juno’s temple at Carthage, with the walls of Dido’s new city rising around him, the
emerging heart of a fresh trading empire. In telling parallel, Prospero’s meditation hymning
the anticipated demise of human civilization is enacted in the Globe Theatre on the banks of
the River Thames, with some impressive towers, palaces and temples rising on the opposite
bank, heralding an incipient British Empire (Pitcher; Wright). Early Modern London was
regularly troped as Troy Novant, an important staging post in the grand arc of the translatio
imperii, that sprawling mediaeval myth whereby political legitimacy, knowledge and
prestige, stemming from ancient Babylon and going back to the Biblical Eden, were
supposedly transferred from ancient Greece westward across time, following the trajectory of
the sun (as happens in miniature in Poe’s story) in history’s longer purview – first to Rome

and from thence to Paris and London and, eventually, to the New World and Edgar Allan Poe
(see Curtius).
In these rhetorically parallel moments from the Aeneid and The Tempest, history is
paused, hanging in the balance. Prospero’s masque celebrating dynastic triumph and political
restitution is emblematically disrupted by Caliban, Aeneas’s reverie by the arrival of Queen
Dido; for Dido is the temptress whose affair with Aeneas could potentially derail his destiny
to become the future founder of Rome, as told in W.F. Jackson Knight’s prose translation:
‘As Aeneas the Dardan looked in wonder at these pictures of Troy, rapt and intent in
concentration, for he had eyes only for them, the queen herself, Dido, in all her beauty,
walked to the temple in state…’ (Aeneid 42‒43). The two mythicized moments of crisis (both
narrative crises and historical-cultural crises) enact threats to the continuity of human
(Western) civilization. Fortunately, according to the Virgilian mythos, Aeneas’s Romanitas
holds firm, and he deserts Dido to successfully found what becomes the imperial city of
Virgil’s literary patron, the Emperor Augustus. Prospero’s vertiginous glance into the void,
provoked by his sudden memory of the rebarbative Caliban, proves equally ephemeral.
Instead of dissolving like ‘the baseless fabric of this vision,’ (4.1.151) the real-world towers,
palaces and temples of London grow and thrive to sustain the largest and richest empire the
world has known. Prospero’s private nightmare premonition of all-encompassing vanitas is
seemingly forgotten. He stills his ‘beating mind’ and returns to Milan in dynastic triumph,
leaving Caliban to his fate.
In both cases the vision is double-sided: the comedic ‘happy ending’ that transpires
historically (the rise of Rome, Prospero’s return to Milan, the development of what will
become the British Empire) is shadowed by two incipient disturbances, unregarded at the
time, but increasingly acknowledged today. The parallel disasters, which shadow allied
civilizational developments in this historical vortex, announce themselves in two famous
literary curses: Dido’s curse on the faithless Aeneas; and that which the slave Caliban
pronounces on his master, Prospero. Abandoning Dido provokes the Punic Wars, perhaps
presaging, emblematically and fancifully – why should we not make such leaps? – the
struggles of the Women’s Movement across the long twentieth century. Abandoning Caliban
speaks eloquently to the future history of slavery and thence to Black Lives Matter in our
own century. The burgeoning British Empire is doomed from its inception. Civilizations and
their constitutive visions rise and fall, synchronically and diachronically, both sequentially
and in historical parallel: Virgil, Shakespeare and Poe. Contrarian potentialities are ever

present. The effect is not far from Herakleitos’s famous aphorism: the way up is the way
down (DK B60).
Which brings us to the climax of ‘Masque of the Red Death,’ a third significant
moment when, narratologically speaking, history holds its breath. The intertextual allegoresis
functions with (seemingly) only the slightest nudges from author to reader. There is nothing
in Poe’s text granting cogency let alone legitimacy to the giant cultural riff we have been
following, no necessary pointer to The Tempest and therefore none to Virgil. The only
explicit handhold on this otherwise smooth referential cliff-face would be Caliban’s curse in
The Tempest, ‘The red plague rid you [kill you] / For learning me your language!’ (1.2.363–
64). Surely not! – Poe’s whole literary structure premised on one slight and arcane referent?
What superlative literary cheek. Allow that possibility, and readers have admitted themselves
a fortiori as paid-up citizens in what Jacques Barzun once called The House of Intellect. They
have deliberately entered an arcane bastion of literary jouissance and artistic experience (like
the Prince’s ‘castellated abbey’, Axёl’s castle, Des Esseintes’s Fontenay retreat, their own
‘Strawberry Hill’) that alienates them, marks them off, from the concerns of quotidian
humanity. Perhaps the intent of ‘Masque of the Red Death’ is indeed to help us reassess such
language, especially to re-evaluate cultured literariness, by alerting us to its equivocal nature.
These pretensions are no defence against plague.
The uninvited masquer wearing the mask of the Red Death (we remember Poe’s
equivocation over ‘mask’ and ‘masque’ in naming his tale) makes his way gravely through
the seven chambers in which the revels are taking place until, at the climax of his stately
progress, he is challenged by the Prince, greatly incensed by the gross tactlessness of this
unwanted guest’s presence and attire. Two things happen. The Prince chases after the intruder
and attacks him ‘with dagger born aloft,’ until the latter turns on him, a ‘sharp cry’ is uttered
(by whom remains unclear), following which, using Poe’s characteristically estranging
syntax, ‘instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero’ (676).2 The revellers
seize the intruder, but gasp ‘in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-
like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form’
(676). There is nothing inside. They all die, one by one, at which point time stops: ‘the life of
the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay’ (677). ‘And now was acknowledged
the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night’ (677). The story
concludes with sombre finality, ‘And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable
dominion over all’ (677).

The tale’s conclusion invokes two venerable motifs: the tragically misguided attempt
to thwart death by assaulting the allegorical figure of Death, and then the ungraspable,
incomprehensible vacuity of death itself. To illustrate the first, we might recall Chaucer’s
‘Pardoner’s Tale’ in which three young drunks, deeply affronted on hearing that a friend has
died, swear they will seek out Death and kill him:
‘Herkneth, felawes, we thre been al ones;
Lat ech of us holde up his hand til oother,
And ech of us bicomen otheres brother,
And we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth.
He shal be slayn, which that so manye sleeth,
By Goddes dignitee, er it be nyght!’ (410‒415)
Through their own cupidity, treachery and stupidity, all three end up dead. They kill each
other, enlarging death’s dominion, while Death itself evades their attentions. The second
motif is magnificently illustrated in Epicurus’s Letter to Menoeceus:
So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death
is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern
either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.
(85)
Poe collapses the two motifs into one. The Prince attacks the Red Death and dies, after which
the masquers unmask the ‘Red Death’ and find ‘nothing’ – and they also die. Only after the
allegorical figure of death has been ‘slain,’ his disguise fatally punctured, can the presence of
the Red Death be acknowledged, and this happens when no-one in the tale is alive to do any
acknowledging. The one surviving process is decay, pointing towards final entropic
dissolution and a plenum of nothingness.
The entire superstructure of Western art and culture has been symptomatically
invoked, its diachronic rise and fall, systole and diastole, and has proven wholly incapable of
resisting the Red Death; as incapable, indeed, as those people unacquainted with any of its
pretensions. The plague unmasks the masque of Western cultural afflatus, exposing its
nescience in the face of a malignancy it cannot apprehend.
Except, of course, for the surveillant consciousness of the reader responding to Poe’s
narratorial voice. This is the paradox on which the meaning of Poe’s tale finally turns, the
symbolist’s redux. The Red Death comes ‘like a thief in the night’. In the Bible, that which
comes ‘as a thief in the night’ is ‘the day of the Lord,’ the much longed-for salvation where

‘the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat,
the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up’ (2 Pet. 3.10). Poe’s
apocalypse is quieter. The narrating voice simply stops. We are left palpably on our own. But
we are there. The reader’s irrefragable conscious aliveness is the symbolists’ nirvana, the
untapped arena in which fresh, unsullied apprehension and even appreciation become
possible. This is what the tale’s symbolism has delivered. The Red Death emancipates the
reader by rehearsing and then symbolically ridding the would-be creator of moribund artistic-
intellectual tradition – flattening the whole inflated construct with more than Platonic zeal.
Having survived this ‘death,’ the avant garde are once more on a par with quotidian
humanity and can begin to create from a position of egalitarian clarity and alertness.
As readers, we are left attempting to adjudicate between ‘Masque of the Red Death’
as a monological horror story that exhausts its meaning in the mere telling, horror for the sake
of horror, and the tale as a seductive, reader-driven narrative springboard for scuppering
cultural allegoresis, delivering visions that melt ‘into air, into thin air’ until, ‘like this
insubstantial pageant faded,’ they ‘Leave not a wrack behind’ (The Tempest 4.1.150, 155‒
56).
Poe designedly caters for both modes of narrative apprehension. The choice is there –
sheer horror or cultural fabulation – but, ironically, the choice exists only for readers properly
equipped to sojourn fruitfully in what Tennyson in 1832 called ‘The Palace of Art’.3
Notes
1. For example, The Boston Globe: ‘These days, the short story strikes me as a metaphor of a
kind Poe never intended but which is applicable to this crisis: Who among us is akin to the
ghastly, ghostly figure who wanders through the party spreading disease?’ (Lehigh 2020);
Medium: ‘“The external world could take care of itself”. For Donald Trump, it wasn’t just the
rest of the world, but even parts of America itself that were to be left on their own’ (Carlson
2020); Livewire:
The central character… decides that barring a thousand-odd friends among the
nobility and the rich, his castle would be closed off to those who contract the illness.
In short, those with resources would be protected from the disease, but those stranded
outside would be left to possibly die. (Chakraborty 2020)
Psychology Today: ‘The palace had been sealed, as it turns out, to no avail. The deadly
disease was already inside. The ruler and his revellers had quarantined themselves with

death’ (Fileva 2020); The Prospector Daily: ‘“Masque of the Red Death” serves as a parallel
not only to the tragic deaths it can foresee, but in the lack of morality in human behavior’
(Martinez 2020).
2. Poe is a hugely conscious stylist. Controversy over the effectiveness, sophistication and
felicity of his prose and poetry has been fierce. The debate is summarised in Zimmerman (3‒
27). Sadly, despite the brilliance of his literary constructions, I incline to the view mordantly
expressed by Harold Bloom: ‘Poe is inescapable though a vicious stylist in all his works’
(‘Editor’s Note’ vii). However, in mitigation, Bloom has also contributed one of the finest
summative insights into his work: ‘Poe dwells, with the rest of us, in Plato’s Cave but wants,
more desperately than most do, to find his way out into the disembodied light’ (‘Introduction’
xi).
3. See the epigraph to this essay.
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